Lone­li­ness can Trig­ger Heart Dis­ease and Strokes

Be­ing lonely and so­cially iso­lated can in­crease a per­son’s risk of heart dis­ease or stroke, new re­search sug­gests.

The ef­fect lone­li­ness has on the heart is sim­i­lar to that seen in peo­ple who suf­fer anx­i­ety or have stress­ful jobs, ex­perts found.

Re­searchers from the Univer­si­ty­ofYork, the Univer­sity of Liver­pool and New­cas­tle Univer­sity re­viewed ev­i­dence on the im­pact lone­li­ness has on heart dis­ease and stroke risk.

They ex­am­ined 23 rel­e­vant stud­ies, in­volv­ing more than 181,000 adults, where 4,628 coro­nary heart dis­ease and 3,002 stroke “events” were recorded. Af­ter analysing the data they found that lone­li­ness and iso­la­tion were as­so­ci­ated with a29%in­crea­sein­risk­for­coro­nary heart dis­ease and a 32% in­crease in risk of stroke.

“We found an as­so­ci­a­tion­be­tween­poor so­cial re­la­tion­ships and in­ci­dent car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease com­pa­ra­ble in size to other recog­nised psy­choso­cial risk fac­tors, such as anx­i­ety and job strain,” the au­thors wrote in the jour­nal Heart.

“Our find­ings in­di­cate that ef­forts to re­duce the risk of coro­nary heart­dis­ease­and­stroke­could­ben­e­fit from tak­ing both lone­li­ness and so­cial iso­la­tion into ac­count.